Rock star farmers unite!

Introducing Serve Your Country Food, a promising new website intended to encourage "thousands of new growers of fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, dairy, and livestock to transform the landscape of sprawling development and corporate control into a
dignified, livable, and culturally rich mosaic of ecological farming."

How? By inducing young "rock star farmers" to sign up and be counted, help create databases and maps, learn how to talk to the media, and more.

Granted, there are some really impressive young growers out there, like Rob at One Straw Revolution, profiled here on the Rant, who reminds me of singer Michael McDonald. But why only YOUNG farmers? Surely some of these new growers are Boomers, right? Harrumph.

Susan’s a garden writer, teacher and activist in the Washington, D.C. area. Co-founder of GardenRant, she also wrote for national gardening magazines and independent garden centers before retiring in 2014. Now she has time for these projects:

Founding and now managing the pro-science educational nonprofit GOOD GARDENING VIDEOS that finds and promotes the best videos on YouTube for teaching people to garden.

Creating and managing DC GARDENS, the nonprofit campaign to promote the public gardens of the Washington, D.C. area, and gardening by locals.

Creating and editing the community website GREENBELT ONLINE to serve her adopted hometown of Greenbelt, Maryland (a “New Deal Utopia” founded in 1937).

Funny, we didn’t see this article as having anything to do with actual “celebs” buying into anything. When looking on the site, there was nothing about celebrity or “rock star” endorsements. That’s not what they were talking about. It is, in fact, a way to make a public image for the young farmer as something more palatable to the mainstream culture of other young people to encourage them to take farming more seriously as a possible career choice.

With the average age of today’s farmer at 65, there is a growing concern that there will not be enough young farmers to take over the helm of the ship when these folks can’t work the fields any longer. Movements such as Serve Your Country Food encourage community building among the scattered group of younger farmers. This type of community building and public awareness is essential to the support of the idea of the young farmer thereby ensuring the future production of the food we eat every day.

We applaud the Rant writers for spreading the word. We’ll be sure to do a feature on our own blog as well.

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